The DockerCon team has been hard at work adding new tracks to the conference schedule in an attempt to deliver a unique experience that is reflective of the vibrant and diverse Docker community.

Here is a brief summary of these additional tracks that will run in parallel to the traditional 4 DockerCon tracks (Use Case, Black Belt, Docker Docker Docker and Wild Card).

1) Community Theater

After a successful pilot in DockerCon Europe last year, we’re happy to bring the Community Theater to DockerCon Seattle this year.

Located in the center of the Ecosystem Expo Hall, the Community Theater highlights the makers and doers in the Docker community. Grab a seat in our pop-up-theater style track and listen to great lightning talks and whiteboard sessions from community and ecosystem experts.

2) Ecosystem Track

The Ecosystem Track showcases the great work of the companies sponsoring DockerCon. From talks on container monitoring and logging to container security and storage, the Ecosystem Track offers a diverse range of topics and opportunity to learn more about the variety of Open source and commercial solutions available in the Docker ecosystem. Attending some of these sessions, will definitely help you decide which booth you want to visit in order to continue the conversation.

Here are a few examples of sessions in this track:

Data Persistence in the New Container World by EMC Code

How 1&1 Internet is Offering Hosting Solutions with a Highly Scalable, Multi-Tenant Platform Built on Docker by 1&1 Internet

3) Open Forum

Yet another new addition to DockerCon this year, we are excited to launch a new track called Open Forum. This room is our unique version of hybrid Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and interactive panel discussions. The goal is for a highly interactive conversational room around some guided topics. Be sure to stop in at some point during the conference and let us know what you think!

Curated Birds-of-a-Feather

From discussions about Docker in Open Science Data Analysis to demos of how to run a Swarm cluster on ARM, we’ve selected a few lightning talks to get the conversations going on a broad range of topics. This curated BoFs also gives us the opportunity to accept a few more proposals from the CFP submissions.

Open Birds-of-a-Feather

We’ll also have a number of slots available for speakers to sign up for open slots. The idea is for them to list the topics they want to lead discussions about. DockerCon attendees will be able to reference whiteboard to see which table / topic they want to sit at. The sessions are intended to be interactive and collaborative. Think more white-boarding and less powerpoint presentations.

This is the space to connect with the community and learn more about specific topics through group discussions.

Panels

Bring your questions and join a panel of top media and analysts covering containers for what is expected to be a truly informative and interesting perspective on Docker, the container ecosystem, and best (and worst) practices when talking containers. You will hear about the present and future of Docker from the perspective of those who have seen many a technology wave, and have heard from hundreds of companies building on, with, or for Docker. The session will also talk about the evolving community, the role of open source, container standards, and what we should prepare for in 2016.

4) Contribute and collaborate

Having a hard time understanding how the different Docker projects fit together? Getting lost in Github issues and don’t know how to start contributing? Looking to catch up with your favorite Docker maintainers and discuss project roadmaps? Then the Contribute & Collaborate Track is for you.

This track is all about open source and collaboration. Some sessions will be “traditional” talks selected from the CFP but we’ve also schedule more informal sessions led by the Docker team:

Contributing 101: two sessions (one for the major Go projects Engine/Swarm/Containerd, another for Compose/Machine/Kitematic/…), where a maintainer will give a presentation about the basics of contributing to docker projects. You’ll learn about their day to day operations, from project roles to pull request workflows, and how to best keep up to date on the latest merges and roadmap items.

Meet the maintainers: two sessions (one for the major Go projects Engine/Swarm/Containerd, another for Compose/Machine/Kitematic/…), where more experiences contributors or members of the community will come ask all kinds of questions (such as the famous “will you merge my PR?” and “will you fix my issue?”).